Awaken to a spirituality that values diversity

Under "Holistic Spirituality" today on the Whole Spectrum Healing Blog, Catherine Campbell writes, "One of the positive things happening in today’s world is a groundswell in grassroots spirituality. A spirituality that is neither competitive nor claiming to be the 'right way': a spirituality that is characterised by an inner experiencing of the sacred and a willingness to do personal transformative work: a spirituality that embraces and values a diversity of paths, whilst honoring the universal." As she considers the role of religion in this opening spirituality, Campbell quotes Thomas Moore’s Dark Nights of the Soul and includes Moore’s suggestion:

"Maybe your dark night is a gestation, a coming into being of a level of existence you have never dreamed of. Maybe your dark night is one big ironical challenge, just the opposite of what it appears to be — not a dying, but a birthing."

Campbell observes, "First thoughts revolve around two commonly misused phrases, 'awakening the spirit' and 'how to be spiritual'. One simply cannot awaken what is a priori; neither can one be anything other than what one already is – Spirit in human form. What we can do is awaken TO Spirit, then act in ways that allow us to BE, as one of my professors was fond of saying, 'alive and awake to being alive and awake,' as good a definition as any of what 'being spiritual' means. Journalist and man of faith Bill Moyers wrote, 'Any journalist worth his or her salt knows the real story today is to define what it means to be spiritual. This is the biggest story — not only of the decade but of the century.' Today, more than ever, the human world requires such an inquiry, burdened as it is with anxieties, fears, violence, and an overall soul-sadness. And the natural world, inseparable from the human, is deeply, loudly pleading with us to move ever more intentionally into this soul work of waking to the Spirit that lives in and behind every thing.”